Cake not included

Month: January 2016

It’s been a bit of a slow week in terms of progress, I’ve just been trying to learn more about Pixel Art and improve on it. I came up with a …fire extinguisher and a shelf?

This was my first attempt at starting to use the basics I’ve learned from the great udemy course on Pixel Art which you can find here. Oh, I added an animated door panel thingy too which was pretty fun to mess around with adding super simple animation to it.

I actually wasted most of the week (in terms of my free time at least) to trying to create a game within a game. I wanted to make a working version of a space invaders as a game you could play on the ship, no idea why but I learned a lot about variables and conditional branches so it wasn’t a total waste although I did completely delete it.

As for the game so far, this is how it’s looking currently. Super slow progress for the above reasons.

It will look a lot better when I’ve started adding significant ‘stuff’ to the parallax layer and also fill the room with realistically placed suitable props / objects. I want things to have a use though, I want a lot of things like this happening:

The items can be picked up from the world and used, they obviously appear in your inventory as a normal item would (based on the number you find which will be sometimes randomized using variables). I’m thinking of just having a basic alternative to ‘treasure chests’ which wouldn’t really work in the setting. In the gif above an ‘NPC’ is sent to retrieve some BioGel for the player which can be taken and used to restore HP. Nothing special but something I thought would be cool to use in different ways.

One of those most frustrating things is getting my head around auto-events, parallel processes and linking everything together, takes time I guess when you’re trying to learn how to do the art for the game as well as actually making it.

Hopefully i’ll stop wasting time trying to make games within games and start trying to make some actual progress. All fun, though!

I’ve recently moved things around to make more sense with the start of the game and have just been spending a lot of time trying to learn different techniques relating to texturing, Tilesets, Pixel Art and now Parallax mapping. This is my first attempt after taking forever to match the games custom resolution to the tile number (so things fit).

Obviously it needs more detail added to it but it’s just the starting point. Getting it working and matching with the size of the map was the biggest challenge so now that’s solved I can add more details to the ship exterior.

I’ve also been trying to get used to making my own tiles from scratch that seamlessly tile as you can see on the walls above. Still practicing using the ‘offset’ feature in Photoshop.

Here are the tiles (might seem boring but i’m pretty proud of ’em)

Pretty basic but it works ok with the style i’m aiming for. I did want to make things more pixel art than anything but I think for this game it’ll be a weird mixture until I improve.

Felt like I needed a break from the usual so decided to start getting ideas down for the Title screen and the music. So far it’s ultra simplistic but obviouly sometimes less is more in regards to music for something of this style (and the fact its a title screen).

Here it is at the moment anyway

It’ll probably change quite a bit but I thought it’s better than nothing!

I’m completely new to this concept as with most things relating to making a ‘game’. I was determined to try and learn how to learn how to get some of the great effects that can be seen in a lot of pixel art style games when it comes to a shading similar to Photoshop’s gradient (but in a cooler style suitable for a pixel art aesthetic.

Here’s my first attempt that took way longer than it should have (followed a tutorial pixel for pixel) so not that impressive but I want to keep going over the same thing until I learn it off the top of my head.

I can’t take much credit as I followed a tutorial step by step but as I said, once I remember this technique I can become more advanced with it.

Here is how it looks applied and tiled in-game. I need to start using the technique with colour though, i’m aware that it can be easy to overdo this but wanted to apply it in game to see how it ‘felt’. (Ignore the window wall without the effect applied).

I also made use of the technique to improve the look of Astro (the helmet at least)

Still need to improve on using this clearly but i’m really liking how it’s looking at the start. I followed a great guide here for anyone else looking for a ‘howto’ for this technique.

This will be a blog for me mainly to post progress on Astro! This will be used mainly to get feedback from the RPG community of reddit as it provides an easy way to host screenshots and videos.

Until now I’ve only ever had a brief ‘mess around’ with modding tools for the Source engine. At one time I was working on a Cloverfield Mod that you can see a small video of here.

As I mentioned, most of the content on here will exist just to show work to subreddits easily to get feedback but also wanted to kind of post what progress I have made mainly or myself. I’m not a coder but the software makes it really helpful for people interested in coding and familiarising them with how to basics of coding works in an unintimidating way

(‘Horse man’ is place holder) 😛 (The below was done not by hand but by using the the MV’s GUI to create events making it easy for those new to coding)

So far I’ve fumbled through conditional branches and variables but it’s a ton of fun and hope to continue with this for a while.

In terms of what I have so far, it’s really basic stuff and I’ve just been working on some of the art (if you can call it that) for the main character which is still in an early stage. As you can see below it still needs some work but it’s fun to work on the space suit version of the character

There is also an injured version that is the default when the game starts and you have to crawl for help as below (still needs some tidying up and the actual face needs to be changed as the face is a default art asset):

So this is how the animation looks so far:

In the two days I’ve messing with this, I’ve made a start of a Karma based RPG dialogue tree using variables. It’s ultra basic (as with everything else I’ve done here so far) but it’s a start. The red text below indicates a negative response which will result in negative karma and people feeling negative towards you, and green (not added yet) will be typically the positive response but this seems a bit too dumbed-down so might remove that. (return of the placeholder horse)

It’s a start anyway! One thing that I really liked was the animated screen I made last night. It’s nothing crazy but looks kinda cool! I know it probably seems boring but it’s something I couldn’t have done before yesterday after learning more about Photoshop. You can also see stars passing out of the window #NobodyCares

That’s about it for now.

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